Crisp Stream
Crisp Stream (#9FEBEA) is a soft cyan with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (179°, 66%, 77%) places it in the balanced band at a light lightness. It works as a background wash, large-area fill, or soft illustration tone. Add a darker ink of the same hue when you need type over it. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin crispus, curled — drifted in English from the curled hair sense to fresh and clean. As a color modifier, crisp implies saturation combined with optical clarity, with no haze or film between the eye and the surface. Used across the bright and crisp buckets where the hue is fresh-looking. Slightly less assertive than vivid.
A narrow flowing body of fresh water — smaller than a river, larger than a creek. The color refers to a clear stream over a gravel bed in temperate woodland: a soft, slightly green-shifted blue with the optical clarity of unsilted water. Cooler than aqua, lighter than tide, with the hydrological weight of a word that appears across nearly every English landscape vocabulary.
Closest matches
The nearest named color in three reference sources, ranked by perceptual distance (ΔE76 in CIELAB). ΔE < 1 is imperceptible to most viewers; ΔE > 10 is clearly different. When two sources point to the same hex they’re merged into one tile; click any to open that color’s page.
Variations
Click any swatch to exploreHarmonies
Accessibility
How this color appears to viewers with the four major color-vision-deficiency types. Computed via the Machado (2009) physiologically-based model. If a tile matches the original, the color reads the same to that viewer.
The color used as foreground text against pure white and pure black, with the contrast ratio and WCAG 2.1 grade. Aim for AA (4.5:1) for body text and AA Large (3:1) for 18 pt+ headlines; AAA (7:1) is the gold standard for long-form reading surfaces.